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posted by Fnord666 on Monday August 28 2017, @07:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-their-attention dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Kids have always been a little difficult.

Technology may have made things worse, as the young tend to know more about tech than their parents do.

They know, for example, how to ignore mom and dad and do whatever they like.

Nick Herbert found this a touch frustrating.

Kids have a habit of simply not replying to texts. Not because they're bad kids, but, well, they're doing something more interesting on the phone -- like playing a game.

So, as CBS News reports, Herbert conceived ReplyASAP. This is an app (currently available only on Android) that forces your child to address your texts.

By annoying the living hell out of them.

[...] Herbert insists that ReplyASAP is meant to be used only in emergencies. This isn't about annoying your kids all the time, however tempting that might be.

Indeed, he told me that it's not about forcing your child to reply. Instead, he said: "It is simply a means of getting an important message to the child, even when they have their phone on silent, and for the parent to know they have seen it."

[Ed Note - Updated Google Play link to correct a typo]

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by unauthorized on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:22PM (1 child)

    by unauthorized (3776) on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:22PM (#561097)

    You're absolutely correct...as long as the child is the one paying their own cellphone bill. Which I don't think they can, unless it's a tracphone or something, since kids can't generally enter into contracts of any kind.

    No, you don't get to control someone's hardware just because you are bankrolling a service they use through that hardware. I suppose you can choose to exhort your child into compliance by threatening to end their service if you really wanted to. I can see why the children of such a parent wouldn't trust them enough to install this software on the parent's request.

    Even an adult has no right to demand unlimited usage of someone else's network infrastructure, so I'm not sure why a child would. Even when I was living in a dorm in college, you couldn't get online unless you had approved anti-virus software installed. If a 19 year old who's paying rent (or "housing fees" as they called it) can be forced to install software to get online, why can't a child?

    I disagree, your dorm should not be forcing you to install software. One man's abuse of power does not justify another's abuse of power.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 30 2017, @12:43PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday August 30 2017, @12:43PM (#561463) Journal

    I disagree, your dorm should not be forcing you to install software. One man's abuse of power does not justify another's abuse of power.

    Well, if I didn't want to install the software I could just opt to not use the internet. Perfectly reasonable policy. But as far as I know, nobody ever actually did that, because what would be the point?

    No, you don't get to control someone's hardware just because you are bankrolling a service they use through that hardware. I suppose you can choose to exhort your child into compliance by threatening to end their service if you really wanted to. I can see why the children of such a parent wouldn't trust them enough to install this software on the parent's request.

    Well yeah, when I was a kid I had numerous devices my parents had no control over or even awareness of, but they weren't good for anything other than playing music (Or DOOM if you didn't mind playing that on a one inch screen!). A cellphone is pretty useless without any form of network access, and there's no much reason to take it away from a kid at that point, they can't really cause any trouble with it. I also had a phone at one point that did have service that my parents weren't aware of...got it from a friend (their parents tested consumer electronics for a living so they had literally hundreds of devices and dozens of free service plans...they gave it to her, she gave it to me, they never even knew.) And certainly my parents would have had no right to touch THAT phone...but the phone they eventually gave me and the service plan for it was theirs to do what they wanted with, even after I went to college since they were still paying for it. Of course, those were also subsidized phones, and so ownership of the phone was itself part of the contract they were paying...and also the phones weren't really a gift, they were given with an understanding that I was to use them only for certain purposes and with certain rules in place. If you were to give the kid a fully paid phone as a Christmas gift I *would* probably think that's a bit different.

    There's also the "my house, my electricity, my rules" argument. I mean my parents did once revoke my access to my own computer...which seems perfectly reasonable, considering they were housing and powering the thing. They'd have no right to take it away and sell it, because I bought it with my own money...but they can block me from using it while it's in their house, and they can certainly block me from using it on their network. Although the monitor was technically still theirs so they could have taken that too!